Celebrating Design Excellence

Congratulations to the winners of the Henry Hughes IP awards at the Victoria University of Wellington School of Design’s 2016 end of year exhibition.

We are proud to again be supporting the awards. As a firm which specialises in the identification, protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights, we commend the efforts of the students, and applaud the staff of the School of Design in training, mentoring and encouraging the next generation of designers.

The winners of the Henry Hughes IP awards in 2016 are:

Master of Design Innovation winner: “If We Fail To Construct Our Own Realities – Others Will Do It For Us” by Saint Andrew Matautia

This project addresses the experience of Pasifika students, and compares indigenous practices to a “Eurocentric” aesthetic education, which may not address Pasifika cultural and historic context. The project uses visual ethnography as well as indigenous research methods to identify Pasifika ideologies, and discuss initiatives to improve design education and thinking. The project showed an impressive depth of research and expression of ideas.

The maker can download a specification for the chronometer and assemble it themselves. The finished chronometer produces a printout of the current time when a coin is inserted. The project is a playful commentary on makers’ desire to create a widget which might be unnecessary or redundant, except for its eye appeal; and on the maxim “time is money”. In producing the prototype, the student demonstrated a broad skill set.

Highly Commended: “Hear Me Out” by Olivia Miller

This project was the result of a diligent investigation of the obstacles faced by deaf students, and idea to integrate the students’ learning experience with that of their “hearing” peers. The student gave a lot of thought to translating aspects of learning for both deaf and hearing students into different features of the app.

Industrial Design winner: “Nalo” by Nicole Hone

A wireless speaker to be “planted” in the earth, this project is a thoughtful response to the brief of a speaker for playing the designer’s favourite music. The design’s appeal comes from a skilful combination of material choices and 3D printing techniques.

Media Design winner: “Parametric Alphabet” by Jack Purvis

In this project, the designer has applied parametric design principles to come up with an appealing and adaptable “morphing” of words, which we can see having useful applications in web design.

Highly Commended: “Wanderwear” by Bryan Loh

The designer has taken the brief to innovate in the weather information space, and responded with a unique app which manipulates weather information and user information to solve the perennial problem – what to wear?